The latest news, as reported in the WSJ, has our northern neighbor successful in recovering 500,000 pounds of the stuff from a warehouse in New Brunswick, a Canadian maritime province, and not where Rutgers University is located in New Jersey. (Just in case your iPhone map app is not working right.)
Not too long ago, John Pollack wrote a scholarly and cute book on puns: 'The Pun Also Rises.' It's an authoritative and entertaining book on the origin of puns, the use of puns, and what has to be an exhaustive working of whatever there is to know about puns. Amazingly, to me, Mr. Pollack doesn't offer even one example of the WSJ at work when it comes to puns.
Here is a paper in love with puns. Their traditional 'A-Head' piece usually can't wait to get started with one, or several puns, announcing them in the column's headline. Take the maple syrup story coming out of their Toronto office. Headline: Maple Syrup Plot Thickens in Canada. And this isn't an 'A-Head' piece, but a buried, although continuing, story inside the paper.
In a story that spans three columns, each of which is 2 1/4" deep (therefore a short story), the bylined piece by David George-Cosh (definitely an English Canadian--hyphenated surname) the reporter treats us to:
"the plot thickens...in a heist of a big dollop of Quebec's..."
"...seized more than $1.4 million worth of the sticky stuff in neighboring New Brunswick..."
The 500,000 pounds that's been recovered was making its way back to Quebec in 16 cargo trucks, leaving New Brunswick with a police escort. It is not felt that all of the stolen syrup will be recovered.
The executive-director of the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, Anne-Marie Granger Godbout (definitely a French-Canadian), is optimistic the recovery that has been made will help the authorities find the "'network' that pulled off the heist." Anne-Marie further adds, "It's not just a gang of teenagers [who] have a beer and want to rob a warehouse."
And that's the good news. Canadian teenagers are not more audacious and criminally-minded than their southern counterparts. They drink Molson Light, smoke Players cigarettes, play video games and log onto Facebook and surely spend quality time trying to figure out where and when to do you-know-what to you-know-who.
O Canada.
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